Category: Meta-Skill

Imagine you are boiling milk on the regular burner which gives out the most convenient flame. Then, you need to make the breakfast.

What do you do?

You shift the pot of milk on the lowest flame and cook your breakfast on the convenient burner. You do not keep the half boiled milk aside. You keep it on a low flame, may be very low so that it doesn’t demand your attention and lets you concentrate on the breakfast.

Consider the milk to be your career and breakfast to be your family priority – children, eldercare or some emergency.

You switch the burner off when the milk comes to a boil. Now it will not rot and will remain hot for quite some time.

Milk coming to a boil is the first inning of your career after which you can switch the burner off if the need be.

You can use the boiled milk later but you need to pay attention. There are other options too. Either refrigerate it or reheat it or thicken it to turn it into ‘khoya’ to be used even after a few days.

Just the way you add some coffee or fruits to the cold milk to make a milkshake, you can refrigerate your qualification, experience and then add some short-term courses to make an updated qualification for a new professional opening.

Just the way you thicken the milk for later use, you can polish your parenting skills which could be extremely useful like ‘khoya’ after a long break. These skills could be related to negotiation, conflict resolution, communication, empathy, and emotional intelligence.

Just don’t think that the milk, like your career, will turn stale or sour. Have confidence that you can use it in numerous ways to your advantage, just be creative with it.

Be happy if it turns sour. We will have paneer (cottage cheese), then.

It is high time that we notice these parents who are professionals and have decided to transition into the realm of parenting.

They are practitioners of ‘deliberate motherhood/fatherhood’.

These people are different from those couples where one is a professional while another one straight away takes a train to the ‘parenting station’.

They wish to spend some time on the parenting station before getting back on the professional train. They might create a business on the ‘platform’ of parenting or they might pick another vehicle to go forward, later on.

Let us call these parents PROBE PARENTS.

A PROBE Parent is a Professional before becoming a parent.

For an educated working professional to say that ‘I am not working now’, “I am on a sabbatical’, ‘I am raising my little one’, it sounds helpless.

It sounds like a choice when you say that you are a ‘PROBE PARENT’.

Merely naming a category is not enough. We need to design a path for such professionals who take mini breaks or a major break and wish to join back at a later age.

Each one of us wants to be the best. Each one of us dreams of being the next superstar or the next billionaire. But to hit the perfect score, we must be able to hit the bullseye at each turn.

To be a holistic hero of your life, you need to hit the bullseye in all the life domains that you pick. You need to excel in all the roles that you have chosen to play. Let’s see how we can spice up our lives.

Choose the right partner (a spouse, a teammate, a founder, a mentor, a parent): Whenever start-up investors are asked how do they decide to invest in an idea, they say that they primarily observe two things – the team and the technology. If the co-founder is alone, they would generally want him/her to partner with someone who could complement his/her skills. They check the ‘trust’ quotient between the co-founders otherwise.

The course of life depends on the choice of appropriate partner in various domains of life. The ‘right’ choice boosts up all the building blocks of our life while ‘not so right’ choice dooms our destiny.

Choosing a right life partner is the most crucial decision that decides your happiness on a day-to-day basis.

Never take this decision in haste or under pressure. Own this decision completely by thinking it through.

Your Partnerial excellence depends largely on the personality of the partner whom you choose.

Choose the right workplace – If you wish to have a career and not a job, if you wish to earn respect as well as money, you need to find the right place to work.

Find a company with a culture that will not only accept you as a young mother(when you become one) but will also celebrate the value you bring to the workplace as a parent.

Find a great place to work that trusts you. ‘Trust’ is the key factor in making an organization a great place to work.

A great workplace is one where the employees:

‘Trust’ the people they work for.

Have ‘pride’ in what they do.

‘Enjoy’ the people they work with.

From the manager’s perspective, a great workplace is where they achieve organizational objectives with employees who give their personal best and work together as a team/family in the environment of trust.

Your professional excellence depends largely on the kind of work-place you choose.

Pivot proactively – Never feel rigid when you zero in on a subject to study or when you choose a profession. Be ready to listen to the changes that happen within you and make corresponding changes in your choices proactively.

A year or two studying chemistry can easily be replaced by the next few years in comedy/creative writing classes if that is what you realize about yourself. Do not get into studying chemistry because you do not want to waste these two years or because your parents will be mad at you.

Even after marriage, take your time to figure out if you both chose the right person. Though we do not cease to change even after getting married, we at least know the tributaries of our river. Share the various plans or dreams that you have for future.

Please try to make final pivot before getting into being parents.

Change your partner, if you must without procrastinating and foolishly believing that ‘Things will improve’.

There is no magic paint that can fill the cracks in the relationship wall.

The cracks emerge again after a few months, through the thick layer of freshly applied paint.

Your parental excellence depends largely on the common family vision that both of you opt-in for.

Surprise Yourself – You would never know the depth of your potential unless you leave yourself free from your own thoughts about yourself.

People who are frightened of themselves will work for the people who are not afraid.

As a two or three years old, we were who we were – no fear, no self-consciousness. As we grow a little, we start seeing around, listening around and start to think “What will Mom think about me?”, “What will the teacher think about me?”, or “Oh! What will that stranger think about me?”

That is when we start losing ourselves and our real potential.

You enviously marvel at others and find them hugely better than yourself.

Rather than gaping at them, gaze inside yourself and grasp the dice that God gave you to roll.

The various roles on the dice of life are to be uniquely performed by you. No one can sing the tune of our life, no one can compose it either. Surprise yourself by composing it well without sneaking into listening to the songs that others are playing.

The way leaders are deciding to take their countries forward, the way partners are deciding to raise their families has a new narrative.

Prime Minister of a developed nation like Canada talks about equality, empathy, globalism, and forgiveness as his philosophy. He apologizes with aplomb. He cries and puts his vulnerability out there.

Players like Serena Williams play their roles as a tennis player and a parent like a symphony.

Indian boxer Mary Kom continues to fight with her three children being an integral part of her daily vision of life.

Satya Nadella runs Microsoft with the energy of empathy fuelling the core businesses. He admits that the father in him has shaped the leader in him for the better.

Walls between the masculine and the feminine are breaking and they need to break to make it an ‘and’ game.

We need to put our cultural ‘learned helplessness’ behind us and embrace a more inclusive self-view. Our cultural trappings have built edifices of stereotypes which need to be toppled over and new bridge be built.

The stereotypes like “When husband earns enough money, why is the wife working?” or “A married couple must have children” or “A mother who holds on to her career alongside her children is selfish and aggressive” need not be a part of growing up of the next generation.

The way a man or a woman would etch their roles as per the script of the society is divisive and oppressive for a woman.

We need a social re-engineering of our thoughts about expectations from men & women within marriage and family.

We need to accept the learnings from ‘partnering’ and ‘parenting’ experiences as meta-skills. A meta-skill is a set of practical knowledge which can be applied to various circumstances including ones which we haven’t experienced yet.

Life should be a process of accumulating and applying meta-skills but we fail to optimize their use.

Their suboptimal use causes us to feel less happy as we age and feel less fulfilled. The cross-functional exchange of skills will refine and strengthen our competence as a professional as well as a partner and a parent. My ‘father pod’ can teach my ‘leader pod’ and the opposite is equally possible.

Use of meta-skills like parenting and leadership across many areas of life makes our life wholesome. Spice helps you develop a toolbox of meta-skills to make our passage through life-fulfilling.

“SPICE” helps us to dive deep into the reservoir of our meta-skills as a partner (with a sibling, co-founder or spouse) and as a parent (with a cause, a mentee, children or old parents).

The real-life experience that we face as a partner and parent, if journalled properly and the learnings sieved out, can give valuable life learnings. These are raw material for developing meta-skills but we fail to project them and process them as valuable.

The extract from juices of life, concentrated in our parenting and partnering pods needs to be highlighted as an elixir for staying happily human.

Travel experiences are valued while real-life experiences with real people at home are neither documented nor considered relevant. This is so because no one considers them worth synthesizing and worth applying in professional processes which is a dumb decision.

All people possess experiences, but most of them fail to process & integrate them into more usable form in various domains of our lives. Every partner knows about relationship conflicts, trust issues in not only their lives but in lives of their friends, friend’s relatives, families. This information can be processed into ‘wisdom’. Every parent knows about parenting dilemmas and solutions adopted by so many fellow parents that these real-life concerns can be a great value-add in the personal and professional arena. Various failures in handling children, handling relations can be processed and analyzed to be used in managing egos and team dynamics in offices. These experiences are a goldmine of wisdom if processed, analyzed and integrated into our learning for future use.

SPICE helps us to process the valuable insights from partnering and parenting and integrating them as a meta-skill in our professional and personal lives. Similarly, the professional skill sets can be used on the domestic front.